Listen to the first-ever recordings of volcanic thunder
The sounds of science.
A plume of ash and gas rises from Bogoslof volcano last year.
Dave Schneider / Alaska Volcano Observatory & U.S. Geological Survey.
It’s an explosion that starts within the earth, a release of pressurized gases and bits of rock; either as sharp shards or molten fragments or both. A volcanic eruption is one of the most powerful demonstrations of the dynamism of the planet that we usually think of as solid and unyielding.
It’s also loud. Really, really loud. Underwater eruptions can sound like gunshots or bombs reverberating through the water. Looking for a single, ephemeral sound within all that noise of tons of lava and gas and ash and rock all getting slammed out of the Earth’s crust is like listening for a whisper in a thunderstorm.
Or like, you know, listening for thunder in the middle of a volcanic eruption. That’s exactly what some researchers managed to record during eruptions of Alaska’s Bogoslof volcano last year.
They noticed that cracks and pops in the recordings lined up with the timing of volcanic lightning in the same area. Volcanic lightning occurs when eruptions that send a lot of ash into the atmosphere. During their speed run into the air, the ash particles rub against each other, creating an electric charge a lot like when you rub a balloon against your hair. As the particles spread out, that electric charge discharges into lightning….and apparently, thunder.
Researchers had heard volcanic thunder before, so they knew it existed, but it hadn’t been recorded before. These first recordings were just announced in a paperpublished in Geophysical Research Letters by Matt Haney, a seismologist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory and colleagues.
The deep rumble is the eruption itself, which stops around 10 seconds in, and the cracks are thunder. The researchers had set up the microphones to monitor volcanoes in the area, and seem to have caught the thunder on tape by happenstance. The Bogoslof volcano is not only remote, but is mostly underwater, and so volcanologists couldn’t set up instruments directly on the volcano. Instead, they relied on instruments set up on nearby volcanoes, including microphone arrays, to monitor Bogoslof for eruptions and ash plumes.
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